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Prototyping dreams

So long as the gift is not withheld, the creative spirit remains a stranger to the economics of scarcity.*(Lewis Hyde)

The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into about thirty kilograms of flour until it worked all through the dough.**(Jesus of Nazerath)

The thing about yeast is that it has to be worked through the dough methodically, with effort and dexterity, allowing itself to be totally consumed if the magic is to happen.

Seth Godin writes of the linchpin – a yeast-like person:

‘The goal of the Linchpin is to make things better by making better things. To dance on an edge, to see what’s possible, to create and contribute, to learn and to ship.’^

Here again we see, when we give ourselves completely to what we must do, then the magic happens.

Godin has been reprimanded for his earlier blog on linchpins by a teacher at the York Community College:

“Encouraging anyone to become a Linchpin is seriously bad advice for an individual to pursue and for a company to allow …. think these things through before you put them out there.”^

Here are the economics of scarcity at play that Lewis Hyde finds himself needing to remark upon. The teacher is reinforcing the idea that not everyone can explore something to the nth degree and be remarkable, but, as Erwin McManus points out, we shouldn’t hold back:

‘Life is most enjoyed when we give ourselves away.’^^

My resolve only increases because helping people to notice how they can be remarkable is my dream, and one thing I have realised about a dream is that you have to become seriously-playful with it. The best way to do this is to create playful spaces of inquiry in which we prototype with effort and dexterity until the magic occurs. We are more human when we are more playful:

‘We ventured to cll the category “play” one the most fundamental in life.’*^